Star Wars Resistance Recap: Going Nowhere FastThe Light Stuff

“The Voxx Vortex 5000” was a light and inconsequential episode relying on flashy action and visuals at the expense of virtually everything else.

This recap of Star Wars Resistance Season 2, Episode 9, “The Voxx Vortex 5000”, contains spoilers. You can check out our thoughts on the previous episode by clicking these words.

This late in its middling second season, “The Voxx Vortex 5000” is not the kind of episode that Star Wars Resistance needed. It was a pretty, light, and inconsequential thing heavy on stylish action and visuals, but that’s all there was to it. Nothing was gained from it in the sense of plot, character, or mythology – it whizzed by too fast to leave an impression.

The setup is as follows: Hype Fazon (Donald Faison) is bored, which is understandable, but he proposes that the Colossus pay a visit to a casino operated by a Hutt named Vranki the Blue (John DiMaggio) so that he can flex his racing muscles again, which is slightly less understandable given the Colossus’s current predicament and the fact that I don’t believe that any Hutt anywhere in Star Wars canon has ever proved itself even remotely trustworthy.

Still, needs apparently must, and Hype is so confident in his abilities that he wagers himself in a race through an asteroid belt; if he loses, he’ll be Vranki’s property, and lose he does, since Vranki has rigged the course with obstacles and deployed racing droids which are actually a really cool addition that I could have used more of. Either way, they can’t be beaten by organic pilots, so we need Neeku’s (Josh Brener) algorithmic expertise to level the playing field, and so on, and so forth.

Needless to say “The Voxx Vortex 5000” is inconsequential beyond its facile action, in part because the very idea of racing, once kind of integral to the isolated culture of the Colossus, feels a bit silly given the supposedly elevated stakes of this second season. There’s fun to be had in watching the events unfold but no insight into the characters to be gained from any of it, and no sense that this show actually has anything to offer the broader franchise beyond kid-friendly slapstick and some admittedly nice-looking visual design.

And that’s a shame since most of the cast have a part to play in the shenanigans in Star Wars Resistance Season 2, Episode 9, and their various dynamics and quirks work really well when they come together – there just aren’t enough of them, and the excuse to get them together is too flimsy for their teamwork to matter. It’s also another episode that excuses an excursion from the Colossus, ensuring the core cast continue to feel somewhat divorced from it. The show is, of course, about these characters, but it’s also on some level supposed to be about this oddball floating community that they all inhabit, and it so very rarely is.